Question

If I have

1. mainThread: write data A, 
2. Thread_1: read A and write it to into a Buffer;
3. Thread_2: read from the Buffer.

how to synchronize these three threads safely, with not much performance loss? Is there any existing solution to use? I use C/C++ on linux.

IMPORTANT: the goal is to know the synchronization mechanism or algorithms for this particular case, not how mutex or semaphore works.

Answer 1

First, I’d consider the possibility of building this as three separate processes, using pipes to connect them. A pipe is (in essence) a small buffer with locking handled automatically by the kernel. If you do end up using threads for this, most of your time/effort will be spent on creating nearly an exact duplicate of the pipes that are already built into the kernel.

Second, if you decide to build this all on your own anyway, I’d give serious consideration to following a similar model anyway. You don’t need to be slavish about it, but I’d still think primarily in terms of a data structure to which one thread writes data, and from which another reads the data. By strong preference, all the necessary thread locking necessary would be built into that data structure, so most of the code in the thread is quite simple, reading, processing, and writing data. The main difference from using normal Unix pipes would be that in this case you can maintain the data in a more convenient format, instead of all the reading and writing being in text.

As such, what I think you’re looking for is basically a thread-safe queue. With that, nearly everything else involved becomes borders on trivial (at least the threading part of it does — the processing involved may not be, but at least building it with multiple threads isn’t adding much to the complexity).